With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children’s sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.
I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence and acceptableness in today’s world.
If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were “abused”? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I’d like to know how this could qualify as “abuse” under a reasonable definition. If you have a personal definition of “abuse” under which it does, I would question why something falling under it obviously qualifies as bad.
“Turned out alright” is different from “turned out optimally.”
I definitely think a case could be made (and in fact it would be my default hypothesis) that the way things have been run since the beginning of time are largely suboptimal, specifically in that they cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. This seems like a perfectly good definition of abuse to me. It is also the case that almost everyone raised before, say 1900 was malnourished and subject to significant child labor and often physical abuse. These are unquestionably abuse by today’s standards, but a lot of people managed to “turn out alright” despite all that.
It is and should be the case that as time progresses, things get better. The sexual permissiveness of our current age is (I believe likely to be) one facet of that.
I definitely think a case could be made (and in fact it would be my default hypothesis) that the way things have been run since the beginning of time are largely suboptimal, specifically in that they cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.
Really? My default assumption is that if something has been around forever it’s at least a local optimum, since otherwise it would have been changed a long time ago. Seriously what are the odds that you’ve noticed an actually improvement that nobody else in it’s history has noticed. To quote Chesterton
There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.
My default assumption is that if something has been around forever it’s at least a local optimum, since otherwise it would have been changed a long time ago.
A local equilibrium is different from a local optimum. It’s not that nobody has noticed it, it’s that the Nash equilibrium is to worry more about signalling than improving. The traditions are doing something right; they’re enforcing a meme which is successful in the ancestral environment. That’s just not what I want them to be doing. I can’t make a Cadillac a better luxury car, but I can make it much better at catching rain water.
I agree that my claims could use citations, and the date of 1900 was certainly arbitrary; I don’t have good references off hand per se but the fact that nutritional science is STILL so controversial and unsettled suggests to me that people have not been properly nourished and will continue not to be until someone figures out what proper nourishment is. I would also guess that it is the case that most people today in Africa, India, and much of China are malnourished, though again I don’t have citations offhand. I will try to find some tomorrow when I have more time if you like.
This is not obviously a bad thing. See this essay by Paul Graham for a good discussion for why our modern school system is arguably worse.
I don’t think that I actually disagree with you very much here. The modern school system is awful in a great many ways. On the other hand, some people (myself included) have good experiences which I don’t think would be possible working ten hours a day at a factory, for instance. I also think that people get vastly more access to knowledge at a public school than working on a farm. The system sucks terribly but I think “worse” is a bit of a stretch.
Are you conflating spanking with abuse here? If so, we really need to taboo the word “abuse”.
I would say that much if not most of the time spanking causes significant and unnecessary suffering, so yes that counts as abuse in my book.
I suspect that we have wildly different moral intuitions here, but my basic premise is that significant and unnecessary suffering is bad, and should be avoided, and has happened a lot to most people. This hasn’t necessarily caused them to be worse people, but it hasn’t helped them be better people so I’d say it is bad.
I hope that I have sufficiently taboo’d abuse; I have tried to use it only when I explicitly define it, and in my previous post only to reference things which I believe would fit the legal definition.
A local equilibrium is different from a local optimum. It’s not that nobody has noticed it, it’s that the Nash equilibrium is to worry more about signalling than improving.
Keep in mind that unilaterally deviating from a Nash equilibrium doesn’t work. Furthermore, even if you successfully convince other people to also deviate unless the new state is also a Nash equilibrium, you’ll ultimately wind up loosing to the defectors. In any case, I tend to find the “modern” approaches are frequently much heavier on signalling than the traditional ones.
[Spanking] hasn’t necessarily caused them to be worse people, but it hasn’t helped them be better people so I’d say it is bad.
I don’t really agree with the last point. Furthermore, the modern solution to misbehaving children appears to be to drug them with Prozac or something similar which almost certainly does more harm then spanking.
I agree that finding Nash equilibria is important to society, but I think there is great benefit, especially among LWers, to individuals who sacrifice status for values like honesty and truth. Creating ways for these to be Nash equilibria is the only way to make the world more rational, but not the only way to make oneself more rational.
Suggesting a specific alternative method for dealing with misbehaving children does not make the option you first presented better. Not being a parent or a developmental psychologist, I do not know what the best methods would be, but I do sincerely doubt that either spanking or Prozac are among them with rare exceptions.
It seems to me, especially with your specific comparison of Prozac versus spanking (in which you misinterpret my final sentence, which was intended to be a general statement about suffering not a specific statement about spanking), that you have specific political ideas wrapped up in this discussion, entirely separate from the factual issue of whether or not people are better off raised in a sexually repressive or permissive environment. I suspect that continuing this conversation will not be very productive.
If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were “abused”? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I’d like to know how this could qualify as “abuse” under a reasonable definition.
If you look at history you will also find that the current time period is also the least violent, on a per-capita basis. See Steven Pinker’s latest for details. I’m not asserting a correlation; rather, it’s the case that all sorts of things that were once considered perfectly normal are now not, and in at least some cases we consider that to be a pretty significant positive change. To say “our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay” seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.
Yours seems to be more about “Can we tell whether ‘moral progress’ is a meaningful description of historical social change?”
Mine is more along the lines of “It is proposed that we ought to do thus-and-so. The rebuttal is offered that we can’t be obliged to do that since our ancestors didn’t, and they got on okay. But this rebuttal is a fully general counterargument against any moral change, including changes that seem obviously correct; indeed, it would have been a counterargument to the abolition of all sorts of things that we today consider atrocities.”
The rebuttal is offered that we can’t be obliged to do that since our ancestors didn’t, and they got on okay.
Sounds a reasonable, if a bit overly careful, strategy if one is seeking to maximise virtue (in the sense of desirable traits) rather than trying to avoid harm. We currently seem to believe many of the things that are virtuous are brought about by not doing harm or being benevolent to the child, there obviously exist sets of virtues for which this is not true. Also, we may be wrong.
But this rebuttal is a fully general counterargument against any moral change, including changes that seem obviously correct; indeed, it would have been a counterargument to the abolition of all sorts of things that we today consider atrocities
History is not homogeneous when it comes to norms. All sorts of practices where adapted then later abandoned. There are plenty of things people practice that made them turn out great or ok that we or our great-grandparents didn’t practice.The argument can thus pretty consistently be used to change the status quo and create something like “moral progress” or rather a process of “moral change”. You can’t really mine out history, since we may have faulty ideas about what was done and all processes of upbringing will be imperfect. Thus we’ll be trying “new stuff” without knowing it, if it becomes known that we did, congratulations we have just expanded the space of possible approaches on which we have empirical results.
I don’t think this works as a general counterargument to all moral progress. I think it just maps to a different systematised morality than the one you or I might come up with.
To say “our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay” seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.
Not really. It merely means that one’s prior should be in favor of the way with a long tradition behind them. This is no more paradoxical then the fact that even though all progress depends on mutations, most mutations are bad. In fact this is merely that principal applied to memetic evolution.
If you look at history you will find that the current time period is one of, if not the, most sexually permissive in history. So are you arguing that all children who grew up before say the 1960s were “abused”? Given that most of them seem to have turned out alright, I’d like to know how this could qualify as “abuse” under a reasonable definition. If you have a personal definition of “abuse” under which it does, I would question why something falling under it obviously qualifies as bad.
“Turned out alright” is different from “turned out optimally.”
I definitely think a case could be made (and in fact it would be my default hypothesis) that the way things have been run since the beginning of time are largely suboptimal, specifically in that they cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. This seems like a perfectly good definition of abuse to me. It is also the case that almost everyone raised before, say 1900 was malnourished and subject to significant child labor and often physical abuse. These are unquestionably abuse by today’s standards, but a lot of people managed to “turn out alright” despite all that.
It is and should be the case that as time progresses, things get better. The sexual permissiveness of our current age is (I believe likely to be) one facet of that.
Really? My default assumption is that if something has been around forever it’s at least a local optimum, since otherwise it would have been changed a long time ago. Seriously what are the odds that you’ve noticed an actually improvement that nobody else in it’s history has noticed. To quote Chesterton
Seriously, the fact that a tradition has survived a long time is evidence that it is doing something right.
[citation please]
This is not obviously a bad thing. See this essay by Paul Graham for a good discussion for why our modern school system is arguably worse.
Are you conflating spanking with abuse here? If so, we really need to taboo the word “abuse”.
A local equilibrium is different from a local optimum. It’s not that nobody has noticed it, it’s that the Nash equilibrium is to worry more about signalling than improving. The traditions are doing something right; they’re enforcing a meme which is successful in the ancestral environment. That’s just not what I want them to be doing. I can’t make a Cadillac a better luxury car, but I can make it much better at catching rain water.
I agree that my claims could use citations, and the date of 1900 was certainly arbitrary; I don’t have good references off hand per se but the fact that nutritional science is STILL so controversial and unsettled suggests to me that people have not been properly nourished and will continue not to be until someone figures out what proper nourishment is. I would also guess that it is the case that most people today in Africa, India, and much of China are malnourished, though again I don’t have citations offhand. I will try to find some tomorrow when I have more time if you like.
I don’t think that I actually disagree with you very much here. The modern school system is awful in a great many ways. On the other hand, some people (myself included) have good experiences which I don’t think would be possible working ten hours a day at a factory, for instance. I also think that people get vastly more access to knowledge at a public school than working on a farm. The system sucks terribly but I think “worse” is a bit of a stretch.
I would say that much if not most of the time spanking causes significant and unnecessary suffering, so yes that counts as abuse in my book.
I suspect that we have wildly different moral intuitions here, but my basic premise is that significant and unnecessary suffering is bad, and should be avoided, and has happened a lot to most people. This hasn’t necessarily caused them to be worse people, but it hasn’t helped them be better people so I’d say it is bad.
I hope that I have sufficiently taboo’d abuse; I have tried to use it only when I explicitly define it, and in my previous post only to reference things which I believe would fit the legal definition.
Keep in mind that unilaterally deviating from a Nash equilibrium doesn’t work. Furthermore, even if you successfully convince other people to also deviate unless the new state is also a Nash equilibrium, you’ll ultimately wind up loosing to the defectors. In any case, I tend to find the “modern” approaches are frequently much heavier on signalling than the traditional ones.
I don’t really agree with the last point. Furthermore, the modern solution to misbehaving children appears to be to drug them with Prozac or something similar which almost certainly does more harm then spanking.
I agree that finding Nash equilibria is important to society, but I think there is great benefit, especially among LWers, to individuals who sacrifice status for values like honesty and truth. Creating ways for these to be Nash equilibria is the only way to make the world more rational, but not the only way to make oneself more rational.
Suggesting a specific alternative method for dealing with misbehaving children does not make the option you first presented better. Not being a parent or a developmental psychologist, I do not know what the best methods would be, but I do sincerely doubt that either spanking or Prozac are among them with rare exceptions.
It seems to me, especially with your specific comparison of Prozac versus spanking (in which you misinterpret my final sentence, which was intended to be a general statement about suffering not a specific statement about spanking), that you have specific political ideas wrapped up in this discussion, entirely separate from the factual issue of whether or not people are better off raised in a sexually repressive or permissive environment. I suspect that continuing this conversation will not be very productive.
If you look at history you will also find that the current time period is also the least violent, on a per-capita basis. See Steven Pinker’s latest for details. I’m not asserting a correlation; rather, it’s the case that all sorts of things that were once considered perfectly normal are now not, and in at least some cases we consider that to be a pretty significant positive change. To say “our ancestors did it, and they turned out okay” seems like a general argument against any sort of moral progress.
I really should get the top level post based on this finished soon.
Yes, but I think these are on different themes.
Yours seems to be more about “Can we tell whether ‘moral progress’ is a meaningful description of historical social change?”
Mine is more along the lines of “It is proposed that we ought to do thus-and-so. The rebuttal is offered that we can’t be obliged to do that since our ancestors didn’t, and they got on okay. But this rebuttal is a fully general counterargument against any moral change, including changes that seem obviously correct; indeed, it would have been a counterargument to the abolition of all sorts of things that we today consider atrocities.”
Sounds a reasonable, if a bit overly careful, strategy if one is seeking to maximise virtue (in the sense of desirable traits) rather than trying to avoid harm. We currently seem to believe many of the things that are virtuous are brought about by not doing harm or being benevolent to the child, there obviously exist sets of virtues for which this is not true. Also, we may be wrong.
History is not homogeneous when it comes to norms. All sorts of practices where adapted then later abandoned. There are plenty of things people practice that made them turn out great or ok that we or our great-grandparents didn’t practice.The argument can thus pretty consistently be used to change the status quo and create something like “moral progress” or rather a process of “moral change”. You can’t really mine out history, since we may have faulty ideas about what was done and all processes of upbringing will be imperfect. Thus we’ll be trying “new stuff” without knowing it, if it becomes known that we did, congratulations we have just expanded the space of possible approaches on which we have empirical results.
I don’t think this works as a general counterargument to all moral progress. I think it just maps to a different systematised morality than the one you or I might come up with.
Not really. It merely means that one’s prior should be in favor of the way with a long tradition behind them. This is no more paradoxical then the fact that even though all progress depends on mutations, most mutations are bad. In fact this is merely that principal applied to memetic evolution.